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Veterans center reaches out to Cambodians with PTSD help

Attendees at Monday night s post-traumatic stress disorder awareness night at the Lowell VFW. The event, which focused on Cambodian-American veterans, was organized by Veterans Assisting Veterans to explain PTSD and emphasize there is help available.
SUN/AARON CURTIS

LOWELL -- Eleven of the soldiers that Army paratrooper Richard Barbato fought beside in Iraq came back home only to take their own lives.

As Barbato, outreach specialist for the Lowell Vet Center, told a group that gathered at Lowell's VFW Hall on Plain Street on Monday night, "When you go to war, in a year you're cramming in a lifetime's worth of bad experiences."

Barbato was one of the speakers invited to the VFW to discuss post-traumatic stress disorder experienced by U.S veterans and to emphasize that help is available through organizations like his.

"In (battle), something happens -- you lose a friend of yours who's standing next to you one minute and the next minute you're loading him in to the back of a Humvee -- you can't have a breakdown," Barbato said.

The traumatic experiences on the battlefield, if not addressed, are brought back to civilian life by the veteran through feelings of isolation, nightmares, insomnia, guilt, shame, addiction and a lack of motivation -- a few signs of PTSD that can damage a person's life and relationships.

"If you don't sit down with someone who can help you lay down the pieces and put them back together, it's not going to get any better," Barbato said.

Monday's event focused on a portion of the veteran population prominent in the community that might have been previously overlooked.

Virak Jey, a Cambodian-American, served in the Army and Air Force, entering with the 101st Airborne Division right after 9/11.

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He helped set up the tentatively named organization Cambodian-American Veterans.

Jey pointed out that over the last week, leading up to Monday's event, he's been approached by the family and friends of six Cambodian-American veterans residing in the Lowell community who are showing signs of PTSD. He mentioned one of those veterans who deals with anxiety and refuses to get into a car after an experience with a roadside bomb while serving abroad.

"The family and friends say they have tried this and that and it's just not working, perhaps we need some professional help," Jey said.

For the Cambodian-American population, which numbers nearly 30,000 in Lowell, a language barrier could lead to a lack of understanding of the services that are available to veterans, according to Jey.

He added that family and friends of the struggling veteran are the ones who have to seek out the assistance.

"A veteran is not going to raise their hand and say that they need help," Jey said.

John MacDonald, a board member of Veterans Assisting Veterans, expressed hope that the meeting would spark some awareness within the community. He referenced a 2012 report put together by the Department of Veterans Affairs that suggests that around 22 veterans a day commit suicide.

"People need to know about what's going on," MacDonald said. "These are combat veterans. Heroes. They're coming home and they're taking their lives. There's a lot of reasons for it but there's also a lot of mystery to it. It's obviously not right and something needs to be done about it."

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